Roon. The ultimate music system
Automation, AV & Hi-Fi - May, 2020
Get involved in the Roon Revolution
I should probably start this post with a bit of a warning. If you are in any way serious about your music, whether that be attaining the pinnacle of sound quality, wanting to delve into and explore a massive music collection, or just plain wanting the best music listening experience on the planet (by some margin), you won’t get to the end of this post without wanting to put your Roon order in!
The Problem
In this day and age the majority of music is streamed from a provider such as Spotify, or played from a collection on a hard drive. Usually using iTunes. Lists and lists of album names, artist names, track names, and a cover photo. A big long boring list that you’ve got to curate yourself into playlists or know what you are searching for to start getting the best out of it. The experience is cold. The joy of unwrapping a vinyl or CD, admiring the cover, flicking through the booklet, it’s not there. Have you ever been in that situation where you invite your friends over, “hey come have a blast on my new sound system, what shall we play?”. And then you stare at the endless list of data, pick a couple songs you can remember, get fed up of bashing things in the search box, and before long have lost enthusiasm in it all.
The Roon Experience
Now Roon is different. Roon wants the looking for the song to be as enjoyable as the listening to it and this starts with the user interface. So far as interfaces go, this is the best I have ever seen. Graphically and content rich, using Roon is like flicking through a glossy magazine of your own musical tastes. Straight from the front page Roon welcomes you and tells you what’s going on in your library today. You dive into a genre, or look further into an album or click onto a featured artist. The music is playing, you are reading biographies, discovering live performances you didn’t know were there, linking through to related acts. Before you know it you’ve spent a couple hours just swimming through your collection bringing up tracks you forgot existed. Tomorrow the home page will be different, and the journey will start all over again
Roon Technology
A slick glossy interface will only get you so far and to describe Roon as such would be a misjustice to just how clever this little kiddie is. For you see Roon is also an audiophile and technophile wet dream. Roon knows every single thing about your music files and your music system. Have a song in your library on MP3 but Tidal has it in CD quality? Roon will seamlessly switch over to the higher quality stream. Listening to Roon on a device that supports high resolution audio? Roon will automatically optimise the music for the highest quality playback your hardware can achieve. Intelligently converting the audio resolution to the best match, or intelligently letting the highest resolution original material get through to the speakers as is. Whatever the optimal solution is, Roon knows it and is doing it. In multiple rooms in the house, with several different people playing several different things through several different systems, all at once. Roon can do this at every format level up to 384kHz/24-bit PCM and DSD256 to Roon Ready devices. That is just plain insane.
Roon Audio Devices
OK so it’s the best interface around, it can achieve the best sound quality around, but here’s the clincher. It probably works with the system you already have… Roon is relatively device agnostic. Any manufacturer of a streaming audio product can send their player off to Roon to be tested and Roon will add them into their database. Roon will then recognise these devices and send them audio optimised for their capabilities. Many more manufacturers have gone the extra mile to be “Roon Ready”. This means they have Roon technology built right into them allowing Roon to deliver the highest quality music possible and have full control over the device while they are at it. And these aren’t just the weird and wonderful niche hi-fi brands either. Arcam, Bluesound, B&W, Chord, Creek, Meridian, NAD, NAIM, Oppo are all systems we’ve installed in the last few years that are Roon Ready. Sonos, Kef, Linn, anything Airplay can be streamed to by Roon. The list is MASSIVE
So what are you waiting for??? Give me a call, let us hook you up. If you have the audio devices in place already we can drop-ship you the core and remote configure it for you in no time!